


Taking Root

by hoarous



Category: The Last Remnant
Genre: Gen, Grief/Mourning, Intergenerational friendship, Minor Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-27
Updated: 2014-11-27
Packaged: 2018-02-27 04:28:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,791
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2679131
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hoarous/pseuds/hoarous
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>David looks around skeptically at the derelict atrium. "Well, if you're planning on fixing this place with your hands, I think you have your work cut out for you," he says.</p><p>To his surprise, Emma laughs. "Anything worth wanting is worth work, my lord."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Taking Root

**Author's Note:**

> Familiarity with the late-game sidequest "The Distant Promise" is strongly recommended, for context.

David has been Marquis for just under a year when Emma petitions him to unseal a part of the castle that has been barred off for as long as he can remember: a little outdoor atrium, tucked into an odd corner between wings. David is familiar with the layout of the castle, has noted, distantly and without much interest, the presence of an area he has no memory of visiting, but he always believed it to be some mistake, this little niche that serves no purpose--perhaps the result of a minor error of planning during some expansion or other. 

"Why would you want to get into there?" he asks Emma, but when she hesitates, he shakes his head. "Never mind, I don’t actually have any problem with it. I'm sure you know what you're doing."

"Thank you, my lord," Emma says, with a small smile.

David signs and seals his approval. It isn't as though it's anything important. 

*

For a time, David forgets the odd petition. The duties of a marquis's station keep him amply occupied, and David still doesn't have a handle on all the practicalities, for all that he has the assistance of the generals to rely upon; he has little time to spare for idle curiosities. It isn't until a few weeks later, shortly after the new year, that it comes to his attention again.

A coincidence of scheduling has left David with an entire afternoon to himself--a rare thing since his father passed. He thinks of leaving the city behind for Fornstrand to watch the sea. Somehow, he instead finds himself wandering the castle halls, finding them strangely quiet in the wake of the holiday.

Eventually, David's footsteps take him to the atrium Emma requested unsealed. He tries the door, finds it unlocked, slips out into the crisp air of late winter. 

David isn't sure what he expected to discover. The floor is stone tile, cracked and marked all over, in some places crushed almost to powder. A few pillars have fallen over. There are moldering naked trellises, some of them broken or half-decayed, and planters large and low, empty of anything but weeds and dirt.

Emma is kneeling in the far planter, her back to David.

"Emma?" says David.

"Good afternoon, Lord David." Emma doesn't turn around, still working at something on the ground before her. "Enjoying your half-holiday?"

David picks his way over to her through the debris. She's hacking at weeds with a spade.

"You wanted this place opened so you could take up gardening?" asks David. It seems almost absurd: Emma Honeywell, warrior, famed general, digging in the dirt.

Emma gives him an unreadable look over her shoulder. Then she says, "It seemed like the right time for it."

"I suppose," says David. The right time? He perches gingerly on the wall of the planter, finding it steady enough to take his weight. "It's been a quiet winter. Even the Jhana are loathe to brave the cold. You must have been bored."

"Hmm." Emma sits back, wiping the back of a gloved hand across her forehead. David realizes that most of the weeds in this planter have been pulled, the dirt turned; she must have been working at it for a while. "I don't know that I'd put it that way. The administrative work of running a country is important, of course, but it's good to do something with your hands every now and then."

David looks around skeptically at the derelict atrium. "Well, if you're planning on fixing this place with your hands, I think you have your work cut out for you," he says.

To his surprise, Emma laughs. "Anything worth wanting is worth work, my lord."

*

In the weeks that follow, Emma seems to spend all her free time in the little ruined atrium. When he has a need to find her, David becomes accustomed to seeking her there first. Sometimes in his own free time, if he can't find an opportunity to escape to Fornstrand instead, he will make his way to the atrium to watch Emma work.

On one such occasion, he asks her, "Why are you doing this, anyway?"

"Why not?" replies Emma. She has begun sowing seeds for flowers and herbs, leaving the broken masonry alone for now.

David makes a dissatisfied noise. "I don't know. There doesn't seem to be a point, that's all."

Emma looks at him and doesn't respond for a moment. Then, unexpectedly: "What do you remember of your mother?"

David frowns. "My mother? Very little." He remembers a soothing voice, a warm figure that seemed to fill the sky. "I was only four when she passed."

"Lady Catherine was an incredible woman. We all admired her. Your father loved her more dearly than he loved himself. When we lost her..."

She trails off. David says, "He was never the same man after, I've been told many times. But I never really knew her, or what he was like before, and now he's gone too."

Emma sighs. "We have lost them both, yes," she says, "but you are still here, and I am still here, and... so is this." She smooths her hands over the last little mound of turned dirt before her.

David thinks about his father, about Athlum, about the Valeria Heart and the Gae Bolg. Everything seems suddenly so strange and unreal, in this disused place hidden in the castle he's lived in his entire life.

"Tell me about my mother," says David.

Emma smiles, and begins to speak.

*

"I've made a friend in town," says David. He actually met her out in Fornstrand, but Emma doesn't need to know about that.

"Oh?" says Emma, elbow-deep in mulch. "Tell me more."

"A Mitra girl. Her family lives off Lower Xiphos. She won't tell me her name though, because I wouldn't tell her mine."

"She doesn't know who you are?" says Emma.

David bristles at her tone. "I don't see why it should matter."

"Hmm. Hard to romance a girl who's intimidated by your rank, is that it?"

_"Emma!"_

*

One afternoon, David visits the garden and Emma isn't present. It's strange to be there without her. He stays only long enough to note the little green points poking out of the dirt. 

*

"Your mother was always a fan of horticulture," says Emma. By now, the garden has just barely begun to look more like a garden and less a ruin. "She loved flowers and gardening. Grew her own spices. She'd even talk about composting for hours if anyone gave her the chance. This used to be her garden--before she came to the castle, there wasn't anything here."

"So it was a mistake," says David.

"Sorry?"

"I mean--this atrium. I've looked at the floor plans, it doesn't make any sense to put something like this here."

"Oh. Well, I suppose it might have been. In any case, when she came to the castle, she found this place and saw that perhaps something could be done with it. So she had the planters built, tiled the floor, put in the fountain..."

"Fountain?"

"There used to be one, there, in the center." David follows her gesture and recognizes what he always took for a lump of rocks as the remains of some structure--the base of a fountain, as Emma says. "You don't remember at all? You used to love to watch it."

David shakes his head. "I was too little. And it's too different now, I suppose." David looks around at the ruined floor, the fallen pillars, the remains of the fountain. "No one took care of it for the past ten years and it's fallen to pieces since."

Emma shakes her head. "No. It wasn't--well, yes, that too, I suppose, but it wasn't only ten years of neglect. Your father..."

"My father?" prompts David, when Emma trails off.

"Losing Lady Catherine took him very hard," she says. "The day after your mother's funeral, he left you in my care and disappeared for hours. The senior staff were in an uproar searching for him--the state he was in, we didn't know what he might do."

"I remember that, a little," says David. He recalls Emma's and Torgal's serious faces, the quiet conversations of adults around him. Not understanding, as a child, but knowing even then that he needed to keep out of their way. 

"We finally found him when... well, Madam Elaine, the steward at the time, heard explosions from her office. He wasn't injured when she came to investigate, but he had destroyed the garden--burned it, with mystic art."

David lets out a long breath.

"Afterwards, I think he must have been ashamed of what he did in his grief," continues Emma. "He ordered it locked away, and no one stepped foot in here for a decade, until I asked you to unseal it." She meets his eyes, steady and serious. "Forgive me, Lord David. I should have told you earlier."

David isn't sure how he feels. Now that he knows to look, he can see the old signs of fire under the wear of a decade of sun and storms away from the care of the castle servants. The grief of his late father, for the mother he barely remembers. 

"No," he says, at length. "You were right before."

"My Lord?"

"They're both gone. It hasn't anything to do with them anymore." Emma still looks as if she wants to protest, but David finds he is suddenly exhausted. "I... I'm tired. I think I'll retire early tonight," he says. David stands, brushing himself off.

"Goodnight, Lord David," says Emma to his retreating back. 

*

Emma enlists the help of Blocter, the son of General Beldur, along with her own daughter Emmy to assist her in restoring the masonry of the garden. After the rains of late spring, Pagus returns from a diplomatic mission in Balterossa with a selection of plant specimens for Emma, suggesting it would be interesting to see how they fare in Athlum's climate. Torgal takes pains to arrange Emma's schedule around the restoration of the garden when possible, allotting her free time preferentially on days when the weather better serves such work.

For his part, David approves the allocation of a small part of the castle's funds for the garden, though Emma never complained about paying for it out of pocket. He continues to split his free time between Fornstrand and the garden.

In the summer, the girl from Fornstrand confronts him about spotting him from afar at the castle, and everything comes out, but she doesn't seem terribly fussed that her new friend has turned out to be the Marquis of Athlum, is just as vocal about her opinions as she's been since the first time he met her. He asks her name again, now that she knows his; she tells him that it's Moksha.

Emma laughs at him again when he lets her know.

*

"I think I want to rebuild the fountain," says Emma on the first day of autumn.

David looks up from the history in his lap, from which he has been reading occasional passages out loud to Emma as she works. "You'll need to find an hydraulic engineer," he says. "I don't think Emmy and Blocter have the expertise."

"Hmm," says Emma, surveying her surroundings. Green and golden, the garden has come a long way in the past six months: the debris cleared away, the floor retiled, the plants hearty and thriving under Emma's diligent care. "Pagus might know someone. Perhaps I'll ask him."

"Mm, probably," agrees David. He turns a page. "Pagus seems to know everyone."

"But not this girl you've been seeing," says Emma, suddenly sly. "I asked him, he says he's never seen her either. How go things with your little belle, anyway? Are you going to introduce her to us sometime before we all expire of curiosity?"

David rolls his eyes. "I've told you before, Emma, it isn't like that."

"It's never too early to consider your future and your succession, you know."

"Oh, of course. Because if I don't have any children, then perhaps the genealogists will declare Emmy my heir, and then where would you be?"

Emma laughs. "Marquise Emmy! I don't think she'd like that at all. You had better get around to producing an heir of your own someday, she'll never forgive you if you try to pry her away from House Honeywell!"

"Let's talk about something else," says David, deadpan, over Emma's hilarity. "Please. Anything."

*

The odd thing, David thinks, is that his conversations with Emma in garden have tended mostly to the personal: family, feelings, memories. When he has thoughts of Athlum, of politics, of the state of the world and of the human condition, it is Moksha he seeks out.

But then perhaps that isn't so strange after all. Emma has known him since infancy and is closely tied with his family besides, and David is well aware of the opinions of all of his generals on matters of state; indeed, part of their duty is to communicate such thoughts with their lord. But Moksha is an ordinary girl of the city, for all that she is bolder and more outspoken than most; her perspective is entirely different from that of anyone at the castle. To David, it's curious and new, thought-provoking.

Or perhaps it's because in the garden, as anywhere within city limits, the proximity and soothing presence of the Valeria Heart acts as a counterbalance to the heavy weight of the Gae Bolg on his soul, dulling its clamor. Out in Fornstrand, he finds he can't help but explore the sensation of that connection, still aching and sore in his mind for all that the binding is now a year and a half old. He remembers that his father, on one of the rare occasions when the elder Lord Nassau spoke of the Remnants of Athlum, intimated that it took him years to become accustomed to his bind with the Gae Bolg.

The Valeria Heart, grand as it is, is by temperament the gentler Remnant, sleepy and sedate, its cycle a natural slow pulse across the broad territories of Athlum. It draws from the well of his soul in a steady stream, its binding a constant susurration in the back of his mind. By contrast, the Gae Bolg is fitful and fickle, by turns silent and nearly deafening.

So far, David has not yet needed to actively call out the Gae Bolg's power. He has seen it, of course, has watched many times as his father sacrificed years of his life to conjure that awful conflagration. David can't imagine how it would feel. He hopes he'll never have the chance to learn it, but he knows that's unlikely; the relative peace of this past year has been anomalous in the trajectory of history. Between the aggression of Ghor, the demands of Celapaleis, and the constant rising threat of fiends from within Athlum's own borders--surely it's inevitable. David can only wish that it were otherwise.

It's nearly winter again by the time the attack comes. David isn't ready for any of it. 

*

There are footsteps approaching from behind David. Emma.

"When I came here to the garden," David says, his voice too loud yet strangely distant in the quiet of the evening, "for a moment I imagined burning it, like my father did. But you've worked so hard all year to restore it, and you haven't even had a chance to fix the fountain..."

"Lord David," says Emma. Her voice is barely above a whisper. "I heard..."

"Her family plans to scatter her ashes to the sea. I... I don't think it would be right for me to attend."

The Gae Bolg has been quiet since the battle, tucked away peacefully in his mind like a drowsy wyvern. Ironic. For the first time in his life, David had wanted more than anything to call on it, and as if responding to his desire, it had been roaring for him, hungry the entire time. If only--

Emma wraps her arms around him.

"I'm sorry," she murmurs into his hair. "I'm so sorry."

If only, if only. If only the Gae Bolg could give life rather than taking it. If only the fiends had been slower, the messenger faster, the treaty with Celapaleis not so limiting.

If only...

"I'm here for you," says Emma. "We are all here for you, whatever you need."

Tomorrow, David knows, he must consider the future: for those who are still here, and for the work that still needs doing. But for now, he settles into Emma's embrace, letting grief take him, and allows himself to weep for the lost.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading. I haven't written any proper fic for about a decade now, so I'm a bit nervous about posting this one! In fact, I originally started this fic to practice David's voice in preparation for a longer story I want to tell that necessarily has to be from his perspective; unfortunately, it ended up not being terribly useful for that purpose because this is a four-years-younger David and he's a bit different. Oh well.
> 
> With regards to Moksha's name: it isn't given in the game, but in order to reach her, you have to defeat monsters named for [artha](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artha), [kama](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kama), and [dharma](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dharma) while David speaks of his hopes for Athlum/[ashram](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashrama_\(stage\)), so the symbolism of the quest arc seems to point in that direction.


End file.
